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Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Review: The Gypsy Moth Summer by Julia Fierro

Very often books provide us with an escape. But sometimes they show us a place not so much an escape but a waking nightmare, a place we don't want to go. Julia Fierro's The Gypsy Moth Summer, a novel about a wealthy community in turmoil, facing its secrets and prejudices, is narrated almost exclusively by outsiders or those on the fringes. And while the characters might, although not certainly, want to be a part of this group, the reader definitely does not.

In 1992, Avalon Island, off the coast of Long Island, is being overrun by rapacious gypsy moths. As they decimate the island's foliage and it's anyone's guess which trees and shrubs will survive the onslaught, they coat everything beneath them in black excrement. The inhabitants of the island are themselves coated in the nastiness of racism, classism, and willful ignorance and disregard of environmental safeties in the name of profit among other things. This ugliness comes to a head when Leslie Day Marshall, the daughter of one of the island's ruling families inherits The Castle, her family's estate, and moves back to Avalon with her black husband and two mixed race children. Leslie's husband Jules is a Harvard trained landscape designer but his skin marks him immediately as an outsider. He is wary of this place, cognizant of the daily casual racism he encounters, uncomfortable except when he's working in the garden. Their son Brooks is a teenager and daughter Eva is just a toddler when they move into this very white, very rich enclave. Maddie Pencott LaRosa is Brooks' age and she lives next door to him in the guest house on her grandparents' estate. Like Brooks, she is an outsider in the tony East side. Her mother grew up in East Avalon, a daughter of wealth and privilege, but Maddie's father is Italian from West Avalon, the side of the island where the working class lives, so Maddie is constantly straddling both sides of a sharp class divide and desperately wanting to fit in with the preppy teenagers at her high school. This summer she's finally made it into the coveted in-group. Her younger brother Dom is also an outsider, his crime hers but also complicated by the fact that the bullies have homed in on the fact that he's gay, something that Dom is only just figuring out himself and is certainly not acceptable in the military inspired society of East Avalon. Veronica, Maddie and Dom's indomitable grandmother, has come back to the island with their grandfather, the Colonel, hiding some major secrets but determined to fight for Grudder Aviation, the company that looms so large over the island. All of these characters come together this summer in what starts out seeming innocent enough but ends explosively.

Jules, Maddie, Dom, and Veronica are the focus of the bulk of the narration with occasional chapters about Leslie's multiple miscarriages and one notable chapter centered on the Colonel. Each of these outsiders builds up a damning story of a terrible place. It's a place where the main industry, Grudder Aviation, is potentially (almost certainly) poisoning the very water the inhabitants drink. Cancer and other biological disasters run rampant through the population who lives there. It's a place where bored, rich teenagers are left to their own devices, drinking, smoking, doing drugs, and exploring sex, while their parents stumble drunkenly from one big, gracious home to another, gossiping about one another, acting two-faced, and turning aaside from their own unconscious racism. It's a place where both casual and intentional cruelty is ignored and accepted. The only disruption to this long standing life is the appearance around the island of graffiti targeting the environmental crimes perpetrated by Grudder. "Grudder is cancer. Grudder kills." These startling pronouncements only cause a ripple in the lush, dreamlike life of the island. But just as the gypsy moths tearing through the island's greenery leaves the land naked to view, so too the events of the summer leave the society and the company open to scrutiny.

The writing is hypnotic and intense with descriptions of the moths, their excrement, and their devastation. Fierro has created a place that is so real feeling you can hear the moths crunching through the trees and see them writhing on every trunk. All of the characters here are hollowed out by desperation of one kind or another. They are well fleshed out and although they seem easy to read, each of them has more going on underneath the surface than expected. But this is a society based on appearance so what's underneath doesn't matter. Until it does. But Fierro doesn't let the reader forget that even the superficial gloss of wealth isn't pretty; in fact, it's downright ugly. The novel was uncomfortable to read and Avalon Island itself sounds like a terrible place filled with horrible people but the novel shines a light on all of the awfulness, the hidden crimes and their unacknowledged impact through the shocking final reckoning in the end. There is an air of impending disaster throughout the novel, heightened by the inexorable progress of the gypsy moths from hatching through to spawning. The narration shifts are easy to follow but sometimes the jumps from one character to another weaken the narrative thread, making it a little too easy to set the novel down. And there isn't an "ism" or social ill that isn't included in the story, lessening the impact that a tighter focus might have had. The foreshadowing is pretty obvious but there are still a few surprises in the end. This is not a light summer read but those who want more heft in their beach bags might enjoy it for sure.

1 comment:

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A voracious reader, fledgling runner, and full time kiddie chauffeur.
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